Delivering the Business Value of Log Management: Told by our Customers

The fun of SaaS Marketing is solving customer problems on the world’s stage and delivering value quickly. At Loggly, we have thousands of users in our free trial at any given time and as they adopt our service they explore how we support their use cases. Our typical user starts by looking at how we aggregate log data, then indexes (and immediately parses!) it to enable them to search across dozens (or thousands) of servers. I thought it would be helpful to share a few data points on how some of our customers have capitalized on their Loggly plans to evolve towards more advanced uses of our product, reflected on the impact to the business.

1. Your log management solution protects revenue

Loggly customers cite proactive monitoring with Loggly dashboards and alerts as an important way that they stay on top of their applications’ behavior and performance. There is a clear tie between the health of their application and their top-line dollars and cents.

According to Brock Haywood, Director of Platform at SendHub, “Application uptime matters a lot in our business. Even if our service is down for a few minutes, we can measure the negative impact on user engagement. It’s very valuable to be able to predict possible outages and take proactive measures to address them.”

Albert Ho, Executive Producer / Product Manager of Platform at Rumble Entertainment, echoes Haywood’s sentiments: “If we didn’t have Loggly, there would be days where our revenue would be affected by as much as 70 percent.”

2. Your log management solution saves time for developers and DevOps

We solve the chore of log management for the fastest growing segment of the economy today, cloud-based businesses. At these companies, Engineering resources and cycles are the scarcest resources. Our solution delivers value to the end customer (the customers of our customers and not the servers), but we do it by also protecting the value and focus of those tasked with delivering it.

Universally, Loggly customers tell us about how much time our solution saves their DevOps teams. For example, xsolla estimates that it saves three person-hours per day because of Loggly. With such huge productivity gains, the bottom-line savings add up fast! More importantly, you’re not robbing your development cycles to pay the troll named Manual Log Inspection. A dollar invested into DevOps to ensure availability, uptime, and performance will pay more dividends than that same dollar invested in acquiring more customers that you may be unprepared to serve.

3. Your log management solution cuts operational costs

We pride ourselves at being close to our customers, and we survey them during and after trial to understand how we can improve our services. Loggly customer surveys indicate that as many as one-third of Loggly customers tried to build their own log management solutions before trying Loggly. Trust us – it’s not easy to make, deliver or manage at scale, nor is it cost effective at scale. (If you REALLY want to build and solve log management service, join us! We’re are always hiring engineers to keep ahead of our growth.)

Rumble Entertainment previously built a log management solution before upgrading to Loggly. They reported that scrapping their internally built log management solution in favor of Loggly doubled their log management capacity, tripled data retention time, and still reduced their monthly costs by more than 75%. That’s a ton of savings to reinvest in engineer cycles to accelerate product and release better games even faster.

A number of Loggly customers tell me that, with Loggly, their log data has become a tool for managing external vendor relationships. “Log data makes it much less ambiguous for both of us to understand what happened in a particular instance,” Brock Haywood of SendHub notes. If your service depends on the availability, reliability, and scalability of third-party services, proactive log management could save you a lot of time and pain.

4. Your log data offers a path to smarter development planning

Since developers are the scarcest resources of net-centric companies, understanding how your development priorities align with how your application is operating in the real world is critical. The answer is in your logs.

Rumble Entertainment maintains weeks of log data, allowing them to immediately analyze health metrics for the last three to four builds and identify potential areas of process improvement. SendHub uses KPIs from logs to guide service level and development project goals each quarter. Data-driven planning means smarter development that can move the needle for your business.

5. Your log management solution is critical but not differentiating

If you want to stay ahead of your cloud-based competitors, you need to keep your development team focused on features that are important to your customers and / or unique to you. Log management is critically important for keeping customers happy and revenue flowing. But, let’s face it: Unless you’re in the log management business, it’s not going to differentiate you from the competition.

Albert Ho reports, “Getting good at log management wasn’t going to make us better game developers, so we were better off finding a service to take it off our developers’ hands and focusing on our core competency.”

According to Brock Haywood, “Our desire is to let other experts do what they are good at so that we can focus on our real competency, delivering a great communications product to our customers.”

The 411 on Investing with Loggly: It’s Good for Your Bottom Line

These examples demonstrate some of the important ways that Loggly customers have achieved return on their investment with subscribing to Loggly. We hear new ones daily and would love to hear yours.

If you have experienced the benefits of Loggly yourself, let me know. If you haven’t yet started your free trial, our fast, agent-free setup process means that you can be saving hours of your DevOps team’s day with an investment of just a few minutes of your time. Get started delivering on the business value of log management today; your customers, DevOps team members and your bottom line will thank you.